Inside the minds of Microsoft's libertarians
The appeal of Ron Paul sheds some light on why techies are attracted to minimal government. It's like smart software.
Barack Obama isn't the only candidate appealing to tech-savvy youth. Republican outsider Ron Paul has generated considerable buzz, especially with his online fundraising and organizing – even his meet-ups in virtual environments like the multiuser computer game World of Warcraft.
The appeal of Paul is baffling to some political observers. After I wrote a piece on the "Ron Paul Conundrum," I got in touch with a number of Paul supporters, including some who work at Microsoft, and asked them why they liked him. Others have noted, including Slate founder Michael Kinsley, that libertarian thought is widespread at the company and that Ayn Rand a popular read there. Paul is a Republican who previously ran for the presidency on the Libertarian ticket, and those principles drive many of his views.
Based on what his supporters say in e-mails, part of Paul's appeal is the way he shakes up the right-left division in our politics, the notion that there are only two ways to look at a problem. This view is emphasized again and again in the media. Political views that turn operating assumptions on their head are rarely tolerated for long in the national debate.
A Microsoft program manager, Eric Blomquist, took me to task for doing this in how I framed my interest in the topic:
The false left/right paradigm is keeping the general public polarized and focused not on the real issues at hand but of the superficial straw men that the media darlings wish us to focus on. When you pose a question and frame it with "why he is getting so much support locally from liberals, conservatives and libertarians," you've already polarized the conversation and attempted to stuff me into a single "bucket". We've come so far as a nation since 1776, but we've also fallen far short from where our founding fathers would have hoped. I don't classify myself as liberal, conservative, or libertarian. How could I possibly lock myself into any one of those labels? Why can't I just be an American?
The passion not to be pigeonholed is typical of many techies. I think it's also undeniable that the presidential debates that include Paul are much more entertaining and informative because he's a wild card. John McCain has called him a "joker in a poker game." He refuses to accept some of the basic premises of the conversation.
For example, take the notion of America's unqualified goodness. When Paul raises the idea that the U.S. might be responsible for bad actions abroad by engaging in a kind of soft imperialism, he gets the elephants in the room trumpeting and stomping loudly, but it serves as a reminder of how hollow are the slogans and jingoism you hear. Rudy Giuliani's shallow 9/11 politics can't stand on its own. Paul keeps dragging the debate back to a larger philosophical context about America's place in the world. That makes the discussion more complicated. That's the virtue of having debates that aren't unipolar, or even bipolar. Paul's libertarianism promises a multi-polar world that most of us have been brainwashed to reject out of hand. In also confounds the simplistic classifications that drive traditional point-counterpoint TV punditry and debate.
Paul's appeal is often described as his principles, his consistency, his honesty, his lack of fear of being different. But by having him on stage, he makes everyone else uncomfortable and opens the door a crack onto a complexity we all know is there, but which few want to address.
One of the most insightful e-mails I received was from Microsoftie Matt Evans. He transferred from Redmond to the company office in Fargo, N.D., and says there's a lot of Paul buzz up there. He favors libertarians in general. He voted for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, in 2004. This time, he's supporting Paul (as is Badnarik). Evans went into a detailed description of how the libertarian and techie mindsets meld at a place like Microsoft. I'm going to quote him at length because it's the best explanation of this I've heard:
As you've no doubt noticed, there seems to be a high overlap with technologists and libertarians. I think this happens for a few reasons:
1) At Microsoft especially, there are a LOT of alpha-males who believe themselves, however rightly or wrongly, to be self-sufficient, high performing individuals because of their own merit. Microsoft attempts to describe itself as a meritocracy, and tries to court this type of employee. If there's any philosophy that espouses meritocracy free of meddling, safety nets, and interference, it's libertarianism and the nearly pure capitalism described by the Austrian school of economists (Hayek, Friedman, etc).
2) Creating software is conceptually the same problem as dictating what the desired behavior of the computer is by creating a set of rules. In the case of computers and software, there is only one way to interpret the software, and it is by definition correct. The hardware never makes a mistake when executing the software.
To the extent that computer systems fail, or are buggy, or don't do what we want them to, represents a human failure to dictate the correct instructions. The instructions ("rules") were written down incorrectly. Because the language (programming language) in a computer must translate unambiguously into instructions for the hardware to execute, the languages are provably unambiguous. There is only one way to interpret them.
Software people know that we have perfect computer languages and perfect machines to execute our desires, and yet we all know (I'm a software tester, btw) that computers are always doing what we didn't mean and are always failing to do what we did mean. The disconnect is our inability to correctly use language to fully express our intentions. Sometimes we just plain wrote the wrong thing. It seemed correct when we did it. Other people looked at it and they thought it was correct also. Even so, later we discover that we got it wrong. Often, the disconnect is that we never thought through all of the possible ramifications of the instructions we gave, or the instructions didn't cover every possible case that might arise.
As software people, we know that even given a perfect machine and a perfect language, humans are the weak link and that we'll write software that produces the wrong result, an unexpected result, and does things we never would have wanted if we had predicted them successfully.
When we go to the voting booth it's not like we forget what we know from our careers.
When we're talking about legislators creating laws, everything is much worse. Legal language is nowhere near as precise as a programming language. The "machine" that executes the law is nowhere near as precise as a physical computer. There will be errors in the law. There will be unintended consequences. There will be horrible fallout from any piece of legislation that nobody could have predicted. And I don't mean to be too conceited, but I've heard of a lot of dumb lawyers and politicians, but not a lot of dumb Microsoft employees. If we can't get it right with perfect language and perfect machines, how are legislators going to get their job right?
In software, we try to write as few instructions as possible, because that means fewer to test, and fewer that could contain errors.
The analagous concept for governanace is to keep our law as light and as simple as possible. That's libertarianism, more than any other competing ideology.
So minimal government means less-buggy government.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 7:38 a.m. inappropriate
hmm: I hadn't honestly paid that much attention to Ron Paul, although I am always more interested in candidates who have actually worked for a living. Most of these guys wouldn't know which end of a shovel is supposed to go in the ground. But if Kristol is against him, he must be doing something right.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 10:07 a.m. inappropriate
Ron Paul: My father-in-law is an avid Ron Paul supporter, and so I've taken the time to look at his website and positions. It is refreshing to see a politician who rejects donations from PACs and big corporations, although he has by no means invented the idea that the left-right dichotomy is artificial (Chucky Schumer, gay darling of the left, is firmly in bed with the pharmaceutical industry, for instance.)
Certainly, any law is a blunt instrument, and every law has unintended consequences. But to throw up your hands and claim that therefore there shouldn't be laws is just willful ignorance, and a return to the law of the jungle. Would you really prefer China's consumer protection laws to ours?
The problem with Paul is that he's this year's Lyndon Larouche, a believer in the black helicopters and UN conspiracy theories. He believes that 'someone' is building a four-lane highway between Mexico and Canada as part of a scheme to subvert American sovereignty. He claims that the International Criminal Court would have the power to try US soldiers for war crimes when he MUST know that's not true (it only applies to countries with no functioning legal system.)
The scandal is that the political system gives us so little choice. But that's increasingly true of the marketplace as well -- try buying clothing that isn't trendy this year, or 'out of season' (a sweatshirt for your kid in February, for instance, when the stores are full of spring wear.) The reality is that in a democracy you get the government, as well as the candidates, you deserve.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 10:28 a.m. inappropriate
Microsofties are not libertarian: Real libertarians would pay for their own soda pop and health care insurance instead of letting nanny state monopoly employer MSFT do it for them via the corrupt federal tax code.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 10:36 a.m. inappropriate
"Software people know that we have perfect computer languages and perfect machines to execute our desires": um, on what planet?! Every new generation of CPUs contains new hardware bugs. Programmers often run up against ambiguous or poorly-defined specs in languages, leading to annoying differences in vendors' implementations of the "same" language.
So where exactly do these perfect systems exist, except in the techie's (or perhaps Microsoft's) fancy and imagination?
These overwrought analogies between software and government are pretty ironic, given that less government (and its corollary, stronger free markets) weakens the job market for them in this country. How about the now-former techies forced out of the industry after the collapse of 1st wave dot-coms and the growth of outsourcing? I wonder if they feel the same way about libertarianism.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 10:55 a.m. inappropriate
Software not like government: When developing software, often it is the case that when you screw up, you're only a three finger salute (ctrl-alt-del) away from getting back to where you were. Not so when it comes to the services we expect and need from government.
The so-called libertarians that inhabit our technocratic corridors are radical experimentalists that don't really appreciate the chaos they would cause. Self satisfied indeed. There's another word for this as well, starts with an "a" ends with an "e"...
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 11:39 a.m. inappropriate
RE: on Paul: Tom,
You, sir, are being fed by the media a line of crap to marganlize Dr. Paul. You say that no highway exists! Have you been to texas? I live in houston and it comes right through here. Its called the trans texas corrodiar. Its replacing US 59. Look it up, or you can just be lazy and take what the idiots are feeding you. Seriously, the people in texas are pissed because the government is taking their land through eminant domain. Whats even worse is its a private institution thats going to run it! Is it still a consirpicy if its really happening? Also in texas, three mexican illegal immigrants raped and killed a 13 year old girl, in TEXAS, and bush and the UN want the UN courts to overturn the case because the guys weren't told they could consult their consulors.
Jeez man, i really get tired of people calling him crazy conspiracy guy, when you have no idea what he is talking about.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 11:41 a.m. inappropriate
Techie libertarians are so funny: I'm always amused by techies who call themselves "libertarians" and want to get rid of the government. It's through trillions of dollars of government subsidies (defense research, procurement, the Internet) that information technology has reached the point where it is today, making it possible for these folks make a living...
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 11:58 a.m. inappropriate
Free Market at Work: The first digital computer, ENIAC, was created with public funds during WWII. The first problem it worked on was for the Manhattan Project. How to make a hydrogen bomb.
Texas Instruments and Fairchild in the 1960s were able to reduce the price of semiconductors to commerical level through contracts from Department of Defense and NASA.
The Internet was a creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a way to link researchers at different universities (not as a communications system in a nuclear war as if often reported, though this was previously conceptualized in DOD work).
One person who acknowledges that the computer industry was substantially founded by public expenditures is Bill Gates, that is Daddy Gates, in his book with Chuck Collins, "Wealth and Commonwealth."
Cyberlibertarians are ahistorical, as is free market theory generally. Modern industries and economies are created by a mesh of public support to build the basic framework (Internet, interstate highways, etc.) and private innovation.
I think we need much more of a government than Ron Paul says. That notwithstanding, I totally respect his positions on demilitarizing the US approach to the world, and not enacting and enforcing laws about personal choices.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 12:09 p.m. inappropriate
Microsoft not "libertarian": "In software, we try to write as few instructions as possible, because that means fewer to test, and fewer that could contain errors." The author then concludes that a small (and therefore Libertarian) government would be similarly less prone to error.
Microsoft is actually notorious for each new version of its software taking up more space on hard drives and offering more bells and whistles while not addressing longstanding and basic user issues and remaining very vulnerable to hackers. Microsoft software therefore is analogous to big/current government, which is, for better or worse, growing larger in order to put out fires, adding more and more services of sometimes questionable value, ignoring longstanding and basic issues (i.e. global warming) and failing to respond effectively to terrorism.
Microsoft is also not known in the courtroom for its love of customer freedom and of the free market, both strong Libertarian values.
On a more serious note, the discussion of appropriate government size also must involve the balance between individual freedoms and protections, which was not addressed in this article.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 12:48 p.m. inappropriate
RE: hmm: Well, I hope more people do start to pay attention.
I follow some economic trends and watch indicators and it looks pretty bleak. The fact that most articles about candidates are written about electability and poll positions vs economic platforms and theory is very telling. Not one (save Paul) has suggested anything resembling core reform. Some have talked about tax cuts, earmarks, and such but it is like talking about using a squirt gun at a factory fire.
Here are the indicators and we better wake up soon (this is kind of . . . well, actually really ugly, so I hope you are sitting down).
1) Merrill Lynch can out and stated we are officially in a recession.
2) The comptroller of the United States (guy who audits the federal govt. books) stated yesterday on t.v. that if the government were a company we would have to file for banruptcy. 2008 is the first year that baby boomers start collecting Social Security. The fund has been wiped out and there is no money outside of borrowing more. There is over 52 Trillion dollars now in liabilty that we won't be able to pay. He stated in order to pay it we would have to raise income tax to 75% or higher levels.
3) Currently federal govt. borrows 2 billion a day to stay afloat. Mostly from foreign central banks. The Chinese govt. has surpassed the Japanese as our biggest creditor. We owe more money to a communist nation that any other in the world.
4) Currently the entire income tax, 40% of Federal Income, goes to pay the interest on national debt. Not a single penny to services. Last year the Income Tax could not even cover the interest payments.
5) 70% of our Gross Domestic Product is consumer spending driven. Very little is actual manufacturing or exports. So goes consumer spending so goes the GDP.
6) December 2007 topped all previous records for foreclosures.
7) The dollar continues to hit record lows. That means savings, what little we have, gets eaten alive. Goods become extremely expensive and foreigners can buy american assets at super discounts.
8) Right now the US is selling off assets, not commodities, to foreign interests at record levels. Bear Stearns, Merill Lynch, and Citibank are all begging the Saudis and Chinese to bail them out. This is on top of the investment they have already made. Countrywide is on the ropes and the Chinese could make a play there if BofA doesn't. That means a foreign communistic govt could likely own the largest mortgage broker in the United States. There are special accounts called Sovereign Trust Funds that are being used to make these purchases.
9) Foreign entities are buying record levels of commercial real estate. My brother,who is ranked in the top 100 REMAX agents in the country, has been approached by Chinese investment arms within the last few months to start buying up BILLIONS of dollars of US property. I too was approached recently by another Chinese entity to find deals for them through my business.
9) Inflation is here and that means we get slammed twice. Dollars buy less because they are down and inflation makes cost of goods go up more. That means personal financial crisis for modern americans.
10) Unemployment is on the rise. Topped 5% in December. If the goverment didn't add jobs we would have seen 17,000 less jobs in the entire country.
If this country is ever brought to it's knees it won't be by suicide bombers it will be with briefcases. However, we are Americans and we have a history of bucking the odds. We just need to face up to our task.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 1:34 p.m. inappropriate
Ron Paul is a "selective Libertarian" re reproductive freedom: Here's yet another Crosscut article written by a man about Ron Paul without highlighting the presidential candidate's outspoken, strident anti-choice views on abortion.
The American Prospect recently ran an article that highlighted how R.Paul is sometimes referred to as a "selective Libertarian" in light of this contradiction.
www.prospect.org
Crosscut.com failed to report that R. Paul has drafted federal legislation (HR 1094) to declare "human life shall be deemed to exist from conception." The writer also overlooked the fact that R.Paul has written two anti-abortion books.
What's more, R.Paul voted against allowing human embryonic stem cell research. Another contradiction to Libertrian values.
When Crosscut runs another feature on R.Paul or his supporters, I hope these issues won't be overlooked again.
I'd also like to see Crosscut feature some local feminist columnists.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 4:32 p.m. inappropriate
Techie == Libertarian? A Problem...: If techies consider themselves libertarians, why does King County have such a big-government, liberal-leaning electorate? We even read that affluent technology types are by disposition liberal and predominantly Democrats. The modern Democratic party is about as far from libertarian as you can get - in fact most of my liberal friends consider Ayn Rand and her followers fascists (of course, they consider everyone who isn't a liberal a fascist, but that's a discussion for another day). I don't see how you can have it both ways. Either you believe in limited government, free association, enlightened self-interest and personal accountability, or you believe in the nanny state ; unless you're a member of the religious right, and you believe in the preacher state.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 5:49 p.m. inappropriate
government a bug?: The incorrect assumption is, "the free market is a clean program; government is a bug."
The free market, like many social institutions is useful. There are gains from trade; trade spurs innovation. It also has flaws. There is always the possiblity of market power. They are huge externalities - social costs not internalized by market participants. The most effective mechanism for counterbalancing has been the creation of laws.
The clean program may in fact be what ourselves and European societies have long had - the mixed economy. Of course this is best with good government. In New York, we have a technology businessman running government very well (though he shouldn't run for President)!
And let us not forget - people actually will sacrifice efficiency for other values. It simply isn't the only human goal.
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 5:57 p.m. inappropriate
The root word of "libertarian" is "liberty," and that's something we all should strive to maximize.
It's not experimentation for a citizen and taxpayer to be allowed to keep what he owns rather than fork it over to the government who then uses the resources it took from the citizen and taxpayer, effectively at the point of a gun, to experment with all sorts of social engineering, income redistribution, and cultural gerrymandering.
It's not experimentation for a land owner to decide the best use of his property, yet government routinely engages in effective takings without compensation through experimental zoning and regulatory schemes.
It's not experiementation for a citizen to insist upon the full exercise of his Constitutional liberties, including the right to keep and bear arms, yet government routinely acts to eviscerate that right all in the name of experimenting with the notion that no, you don't have the right to defend yourself.
It's not experimenting to be outraged at the level of waste and chicanery that's rampant at all levels of government and seek to end dishonorable and profligate practices such as earmarking, subsidies, unwarranted intrusion of government into our lives, and the like, all done in the name of experimenting with whether government can make a difference in matters it routinely screws up.
It's not experimenting to insist that tax policy focus on the raising of revenue to fund necessary government services and activities - emphasis on the word, "necessary," of which there are really damn few! - rather than use it to experiement with so-called "incentives" or other sleight of hand, which are no more than book keeping tricks.
It's not experimenting to contend that Social Security is a rip off, which it is, and that allowing an individual to invest his Social Security contributions in private investment vehicles will, over time, yield a higher return.
It's not experimenting to acknowledge that liberty and freedom - what you call "chaos" - is exactly what this country was founded upon, and that the first, some would say the only legitimate, role of government is to protect the liberty and freedom of its citizens from all enemies foreigh and domestic.
If you are averse to chaos, try totalitarian regimes, they're real good at making trains run on time. As for me, I'll take chaos over command and control any day of the week.
The Piper
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 6:04 p.m. inappropriate
But perhaps Dr. Paul, an Ob-Gyn, supports liberty and freedom and rights, including the right to life, for ALL Americans, even the unborn? Perhaps he's as repulsed as are many Americans that 3,700 human lives are essentially sucked down sinks each day in the United States.
I'm not at all surprised that an Ob-Gyn who has, per his website, delivered over 4,000 babies would hold such views, are you?
The Piper
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 6:49 p.m. inappropriate
thinking through the ramifications: Re: "we all know (I'm a software tester, btw) that computers are always doing what we didn't mean and are always failing to do what we did mean. The disconnect is our inability to correctly use language to fully express our intentions. Sometimes we just plain wrote the wrong thing. It seemed correct when we did it. Other people looked at it and they thought it was correct also. Even so, later we discover that we got it wrong. Often, the disconnect is that we never thought through all of the possible ramifications of the instructions we gave, or the instructions didn't cover every possible case that might arise."
The fed's long-forgotten OTA being the only Department of Unintended Conseqences that I could think of, plus the laughs I always got, I considered my continual pleas for expanding hurried policy analysis into a bonefide Department of Unintended Consequences as so much half-in-fun, whole-in-earnest -- wishful thinking. Until that is, while hunting up Thomas Sowell's 2007 rewrite of Basic Economics, I noticed the title of the book beside it, checked it's index for "earned-income-credit," liked what I read and bought two books instead of one. ( I had just googled "housing subsidies" and found an intriguing, but flawed paper by John Quigley).
Unbeknownst to me, if Gene Sperling's first hand account is to be believed, the entire Clinton administration was based on first "acknowledging the difficulty of anticipating how any action or inaction can create negative unintended consequences," and then "empowering people directly rather than trying to protect them by restricting or impeding markets." --The Pro-growth Progressive--An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity, Sperling, 2005. I highly recommend both books--simple and good English--the two essential sides of the coin. However I explicitly do not extend this recommendation to the rest of Sowell's work. Alas.
Posted Fri, Jan 11, 8:38 a.m. inappropriate
Read David Postman's Blog: See Postman's blog in the Times for some revealing and troubling information on Paul. Yeah, Paul is denying that he wrote the stuff but his denial doesn't pass the sniff test. Also check out the coverage on CNN and the original article in the New Republic. CNN has PDFs of the Paul newsletter.
Posted Fri, Jan 11, 11:04 a.m. inappropriate
Libertarianism: Government in action in one area can create better run markets in other areas. One obvious case is health care. Employer-sponsored health care leads people to stay in jobs they do not like. Government-based health insurance would improve labor mobility.
Another point. Small businesses oppose government regulation, in general. However, they are the first to complain if a street vendor sets up shop in front of their establishment.
Perhaps some vendors can set up shop in front of the homes of prominent Libertarians!
Posted Sat, Jan 12, 8:56 p.m. inappropriate
Libertarian, idealism, and social recluses: If the software industry does indeed trend more towards Libertarianism than the population at large, there's a simple explanation.
The software business is one of the few remaining places where someone with a sparse social network and limited social skills can earn a decent living through cognitive aptitude alone. Libertarianism, with it's idealistic glorification of the individual and pessimism of group dynamics, is a natural fit for this crowd of loners. Of course, libertarianism is pure fantasy, but then so is Halo II.
That said, Libertarians (like the Greens) do have a place in American politics, and it's a shame our winner take all system doesn't make any room for them in Congress (Greens and Libertarians would have official representation in a parliamentary system). The fact that Paul turns notions of left and right upside down makes him an invaluable player in this election.
Posted Mon, Jan 14, 11:56 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Microsofties are not libertarian: "Real libertarians would pay for their own soda pop and health care insurance instead of letting nanny state monopoly employer MSFT do it for them via the corrupt federal tax code."
Microsoft isn't a state or a government. Nobody is forcing people to purchase Microsoft products. You can get an Apple or even run Linux or BSD. "Soda pop" is a small incentive to work there, along with health care.
I'm a contractor there. I pay for my own health insurance, I even pay for my own equipment there. As to the federal tax code being corrupt it certainly is. The entire Federal government is corrupt. Social Security is going insolvent not because people haven't paid enough money into it, but because the Federal government has spent all the suprlus from the program, illegally.
The Federal government is very, very corrupt.
Posted Mon, Jan 14, 12:01 p.m. inappropriate
I have another theory why Paul is popular with engineers: Engineers aren't stupid.
I recognize the fact that the abortion issue is a false promise from the Republicans. We had a Republican judicial, legislative, and executive branch for 6 years and Roe v. Wade still exists.
Fiscal policy will either be the savior or the demise of this country. Paul is the only man that has an understanding of what we are up against. Unlike abortion, this is a very important issue. The United States can actually be facing insolvency in the near term. This is a very important issue.
Religion is irrelevant as long as the 1st amendment is enforced, but enforcement of the constitution which is the only document designed to protect people from an overbearing and out of control government is an important issue.
I'm not going to vote in one of 2 people who differ only in irrelevant details.
Posted Mon, Jan 14, 2:02 p.m. inappropriate
RE: on Paul: LOL. Ron Paul is so crazy to talk about the Nafta Superhighway, right? Tom, you should probably go tell the Canadians that this so called "Nafta Superhighway" they think they're getting is just another one of Crazy Ron Paul's kooky ideas, and they should change their website since you've really done your research on this.
http://www.infratrans.gov.ab.ca/2760.htm
Posted Tue, Jan 15, 11:58 a.m. inappropriate
tech support?: This is from one of America's leading tech businessmen:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/01/ron-pauls-great.html
Is it possible RP's tech support is highest among people who don't value private property? The download culture?